Instant-Pot Vegan Cauliflower Queso

Cauliflower is a magical vegetable. It’s tasty on its own, but it can transform into oil-free creamy sauces and even replace meat. In this recipe, it’s the base for my favorite creamy, cheesy queso sauce. This is great on chips but even better on top of burritos and enchiladas. Best of all, you can get the pickiest of eaters to eat their veggies this way.

Preparation

For the Instant Pot, add the cauliflower, water, carrots and cashews to your Instant Pot and cook on high pressure for 5 minutes, then carefully do a quick pressure release by moving the valve to release the pressure.

Pour the cooked mixture into a strainer over the sink and drain the extra water.

For the blender, put the drained mixture along with the nutritional yeast, liquid drained from the canned tomatoes, smoked paprika, salt, chili powder, jalapeño powder (if using) and mustard powder into your blender. Blend until smooth.

For the mix-ins, scrape out the blender contents into a mixing bowl and stir in the tomatoes and green chiles, bell pepper (if using), minced onion (if using) and cilantro.

You can serve this at room temperature or keep it warm on the lowest slow cooker setting.

One of the better vegan cheese recipes, thank you. And I will be making this again soon. The proportions were spot on, much appreciated, especially the weight alternatives. I used a conventional stovetop pressure cooker, which worked well. I did use frozen cauliflower, because of the nature of the recipe -- not going for crispness but to cook it to mush! Last, I always want to know in these recipes why cashew butter (a good organic low-salt one of course) would not work just as well and be more convenient. Frankly, it's what I used, successfully.

This was AWESOME. I can't believe how creamy and delicious it came out! Even my super picky 6 year old loved it, even though he won't eat cauliflower (when he can see it!). I made for the first time a week or two ago and already yesterday my husband requested it again. Best of all, cooking it in the instant pot was so easy. I never would have thought of pressure cooking cashews. Genius! I can't say enough good things about this recipe. YUM.